The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious

Lydia H. Liu examines how writing has transformed in digital media and traces how writing itself enabled digital media to develop. She provides the first comprehensive study of the political history of digital writing and its connection to the Freudian unconscious. Liu's analysis brings together theorists and writers to document significant intellectual exchanges across disciplines. She demonstrates how avant-garde literary experiments with alphabetical writing and psychoanalytic word-association games contributed to the mathematical foundations of digital media. This intellectual convergence, she argues, transformed alphabetical writing into the postphonetic, ideographic system of digital media—a shift that changed how sense and nonsense function in communication and reshaped understanding of human-machine interaction at the unconscious level. Drawing on information theory, cybernetics, modernism, literary theory, neurotic machines, and psychoanalysis, the book rewrites the history of digital media and twentieth-century literary theory.